Yes, materialism militates against reason at every level, philosophical and scienfitic. I will list only two ways. [There are many others]

First, it denies the very possibility of unchanging truth, often holding, among other things, that all reality is in flux, which means, by extension, that nothing is permanent and, therefore, that there can no such thing as goodness, unity, or truth. Since these things are the objects toward which reason and the intellect strive, at attack on them is also an attack on reason iself, which is the means by which we arrive at them. If truth is reason’s destination, and if that destination doesn’t exist, then the vehicle for making the journey becomes useless. If, by extension, the world has no objective purpose, then reason, the tool which is suppose to help man discover it, has suddenly lost its job and is reduced to looking only for ways to survive and serve human passions. Thus, materialism, disavowing any higher good or purpose than physical comfort, prompts man to pervert his own nature and act like an animal.

Another problem with materialism is the way that it oversimplifies causality, ignoring formal and final causes, fixing exclusively on efficient and material causes, an error that can be costly in many ways. Among other things, it fosters the derivative philosophy of determinism, which rejects all aspects of human free will and reduces man to little more than nature’s plaything. All mental events are explained as effects of physical events, and even mind itself is either denied altogether or reduced to an epiphenomenal extension of matter, totally dependent on matter. Obviously that foundation also rules out religion of any kind, including the possibility of Divine revelation. Materialist theories are essentially reductive, and therefore hostile to reason which seeks answers to questions that transcend the reality of time/space/energy.

I was asking if he had actually said what they were, not simply asserted that he’d done this.

Of course, I won’t mention that nobody has claimed that whales evolved from cows so his whole speech is merely an exercise is sophistry and nonsense.

Impressed you, I see.

I suspect that’s why Darwin is deemed so important—why he is the rasul or apostle of materialism and Marx is only the opiate of the intellectuals.

Whale Evolution? – Exposing The Deception – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyUqoTsmqbA

“My responses here are not intended to “defend” evolutionary biology, they are intended to defend the process by which the science of evolutionary biology has been formulated.”

What exactly are these “processes” which are under attack by ID methodologies? What exactly are they, and how exactly has ID subverted these processes? I would expect that you can name them from the research articles that support ID or from the trade publications that do the same. What are they?

“Is it true that materialism as a metaphysical foundation has improperly informed both the sciences and philosophy?”

Yes to the first, but no to the second. The empirical sciences (i.e. physics, chemistry, geology, etc. but not mathematics, metaphysics, theology, etc.) are not about metaphysics, except insofar as they are based on the metaphysical assumption that only empirical evidence counts, that the only testable hypotheses are those that can be falsified, and that all scientific generalizations are necessarily provisional. As long as these metaphysical “ground rules” are adhered to, you’re doing science.

However, you’re not doing science if you assert that the generalizations that are based on your empirical observations somehow verify or falsify your metaphysical assumptions themselves. This is both logically impossible and ethically pernicious.

By the same argument, materialism as a metaphysical assumption (rather than a methodological guide) cannot be “improper” in the pursuit of philosophy, as metaphysics is one of the branches of philosophy by definition. One may not agree with it, but one cannot assert that materialism is not a metaphysical (and therefore not a philosophical) assumption.

“My discussions. . . (are) based on the metaphysical foundation for ID science, which is the rational nature of the universe which makes science possible, not ID science itself.”

ID science, then, shares an attribute with your religious discussions in that they are both based on common metaphysical underpinnings. Therefore, the “consonance” is pushed back yet another level so that ID does not ramify those religious discussions.

That was my mistake.

Looking back, when I wrote about “what ramifies out of ID and derives from evo/mat thought,” I neglected to clarify that ID science shows restraint in what is ramified, i.e. the nature of the source of the design, while Darwinism and what is derived from it can show no such logical restraint. Or if they can, Darwinists are certainly unwilling to show any restraint. Proof? The entire field of evolutionary psychology.

Perhaps that is why I assumed your conversation came directly out of ID. Perhaps that is also why Darwinist’s make claims all over the map and yet are loathe to pursue their materialism to its logical conclusion in a few distinct areas.

Is it true that materialism as a metaphysical foundation has improperly informed both the sciences and philosophy? Methinks it is like a . . . yes!

On the contrary, the process of doing science involves subjecting one’s own hypotheses to the most rigorous empirical tests one can imagine, in a single-minded attempt to show that they are false. This is what we mean by “falsifiability”: if you can’t come up with some way of showing that your hypothesis can be falsified by empirical observation, your hypothesis is worthless as science.

Ergo, when you perceive that I am “defending” the findings of evolutionary biology, what I am actually doing is to assert that so far those findings have not yet been shown to be inconsistent with our observations of nature. In no way have I ever asserted that the findings of evolutionary biology are “true” or that the generalizations that evolutionary biologists draw from their observations of nature are “facts”. Direct observations are “facts”; the inferences we draw from them (i.e. theories, laws, etc.) are just that — inferences, not “facts”, and are always subject to revision in the face of disconfirming empirical evidence.

Furthermore, I have never asserted that “the whole of [humanity] is the result of evolution, except in the trivial sense that as biological beings our biology is the result of biological evolution. On the contrary, there are huge areas of human intellectual endeavor that are clearly not the result of evolution, morality being one of them. Moreover, I believe that this is the mainstream belief of most scientists (including such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould) and the overwhelming majority of moralists and ethical philosophers, who agree with G. E. Moore that to conflate morality (i.e. “ought” statements) with science (i.e. “is” statements) is a serious logical fallacy (quite rightly called the “naturalistic fallacy”).

As to the evolution of mental processes, I (provisionally) accept the empirical evidence that human mental processes are a product of our evolved neurobiology. However, I agree with Wilder Penfield (perhaps the greatest neurobiologist and brain scientist of all time) in his belief that the content of our mental processes is not a necessary product of that same evolved neurobiology. To assert otherwise is to assert that the wiring of a computer necessarily completely determines all of the content of the programs which reside within it. I hope you will agree with me that this is a nonsensical.

As for your assertion that I believe that religion is a product of our evolved nature, I have no such belief. On the contrary, I have proposed (and please note that this proposal is an hypothesis which has yet to be empirically verified or falsified) that the capacity for religious experience may be an evolutionary adaptation, in the same sense that our capacity for language may be an evolutionary adaptation. Regardless of whether this hypothesis is empirically verified or falsified, I hope you will realize that this has no bearing whatsoever on the content of any particular religious belief, any more than our evolved capacity for language has any bearing on the particular language one learns during the critical period for acquisition of language.

By the same line of argument, even if there is convincing empirical evidence that the capacity for religious experience is (or is not) an evolved capacity, such evidence would clearly have no bearing on the truth or falsity of any particular religious belief (unless, of course, such religious beliefs explicitly and necessarily require that capacity for religious experience not be the product of evolution).

Yes. That’s why I included the word “almost.”